


Chekhov's

by HAL_berd



Category: Rockman X | Mega Man X
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Slight alterations to canon to simplify things for an unknowing original audience, but don't worry X and Zero are the bestest of friends still, character study and world building type dealio
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:28:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26717515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HAL_berd/pseuds/HAL_berd
Summary: 1) X, spokesperson of the Maverick Cure Initiative, holds a press conference. Zero is on the security detail per special request. Evidently, when these stars align, a Maverick attacks.2) Zero's friend X likes to play human at the local university. This all changes when a Maverick attack occurs on campus, and X's little charade is up.(Two separate concepts I had for a writing workshop.)
Relationships: X & Zero
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	1. Chekhov's

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this last year for my creative writing high school course, and literally nobody there knew about Megaman. I had a page limit. Therefore, I had to condense, simplify, and alter Megaman X canon to make it decently self contained and comprehensible in a very short time frame to my classmates, because this was a workshop, and I didn't want to get blasted for four straight pages of exposition, and more than anything, I just wanted to deliver on the themes. Alter my writing style considerably to best fit my audience and, tadah! 
> 
> Flash forward to today, and I found it sitting on my drive. So please enjoy!

Saturday evening, February 3rd, 2235. Androids mill about backstage at a press conference, checking the lights and speakers, testing the connection to nationwide TV, and toiling about at the behest of a human director on comms. The press corp—all human; android news reporting has been prohibited since _Abel City v. The Autonomous Broadcasting Network_ (2203)—buzzes around in the audience chamber, readying their cameras and questions like so many loaded guns. 

Amidst all the chaos, two androids stumble out of a prep room.

“You’re _terrible_ _!_ ” X says between chuckles. “Absolutely _terrible_ _,_ Zero. The _worst_ android I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting, I swear!”

Now X and Zero don’t see eye to eye on certain (read: many) issues, but the thing that’s finally tipped Zero into “worst android I’ve ever met” territory is the headlock-noogie combo he’s using to get X to stop fretting for one hot second.

“Security!” X says, drawing the attention of several android security officers in the vicinity. “Security, this Combatdroid is harassing me! Help! Save—”

With that, Zero gives him a solid bonk on the mechanical skull.

“Shut it!” he says. “You can’t make jokes like that, X. They take your every word as gospel.”

Sure enough, a security android dashes immediately to their location. Admittedly, this looks pretty bad, almost exactly like a Maverick attack. Zero, a big, bulky, armored combat model, has his arm looped around the neck of X, a more compact civilian build dressed in nought but a suit and a lab coat. To reiterate, this is _X_ , who just so happens to be the first android _ever_ and the creator, at least in part, of every modern android in the country except for one. Hint: Zero is the “except for one.”

“Hands off of the Progenitor, Combatdroid,” a female model says, gun leveled at Zero’s face while she gets a good look at his armor. “You’re part of the security detail! What do you think you’re doing?”

Zero puts his hands up while giving X his best “look at what you’ve done” look. X mouths a small “sorry.” 

“Stand down, officer,” Zero says. Now's as good a time as any to throw around authority, so he flashes his very flashy government taskforce badge. “Commander Zero of the 17th Unit of Maverick Hunters, serving as android security under special request of Spokesperson X of the Maverick Cure Initiative.”

The security android keeps the gun trained on Zero’s forehead, with the look on her facial displays shifting from anger, to disbelief, to utter bemusement.

“You’re a _Hunter_ _?_ ” she asks. That, Zero knows, is something of a loaded question. X’s whole platform aims to shut government programs like the Maverick Hunters down by classifying Maverickism as a mental illness, a “viral state” that can be cured instead of a robo-terrorist threat to be met with military action and forcibly put down. X’s crew, this officer included, probably thinks Zero a murderer.

“Yes, a Hunter,” X interjects quickly, “and also a close friend. You needn’t worry, child, he wasn’t doing any harm, I swear.”

The security android looks suspicious, but the Progenitor has delivered His word, so she holsters her gun.

“Don’t rile Spokesperson X up before the conference,” she says and then leaves.

Zero waits until she’s out of earshot.

“You’re a fifty-year-old baby, y’know that?” he says. “All this time and you can’t hold your tongue.”

“It’s not my fault she can’t take a joke,” X says. “Well, actually, maybe it is. I do remember having a hand in programming her; a lot of confidence I put into that one. Guess I didn’t put enough into the humor program—”

Zero holds up a hand to halt X’s rambling. They would be here for hours otherwise.

“Got the gun?” he asks.

X pulls open his lab coat to reveal a holstered pistol (15mm-calibre plasmashot) and what looks to be a loop of high quality steel cable.

“I won’t be using it,” X says. “I’ve never killed before and I don’t plan on changing that today.”

“Whatever,” Zero says. “You can stick to your hippie dippie pacifist crusade if you’d like. It’s more for my peace of mind anyways.”

“Yeah?” X says, with a twinkle in his eyes that screams, _Aww, you_ do _care._

“Yeah.” Zero gives him a quick grin. “Break a servo out there, bud.”

Zero and the rest of the android security detail reposition themselves at the entrances of the audience chamber, and then X walks on stage to a barrage of flashing lights.

It’s a slaughter. Zero almost can’t watch. It’s like wolves clawing into a crippled deer, or three whole Maverick Hunter units converging on a single Mav; the press corp _tears X apart_.

“X! X! Where will the funding come from?”

“Well, until our private research has been concluded, government funding needn’t be involved at all—”

“What about the previous classification of robo-terrorism?”

“One second, please. After widespread implementation of the Maverick Cure becomes a possibility, funds can be reallocated from government programs like the Hunters. Now on Maverickism as a form of robo-terrorism, that is simply incorrect—”

“X! X! Are you suggesting the government ought to defund programs that are currently defending human Abel citizens?”

“Please allow me to finish my answer. Maverickism as a form of robo-terrorism is simply incorrect, as it is induced by an external virus and can be eliminated—”

“X! Isn’t that simply a theory?”

 _“Please allow me to finish my answer_ —”

Zero winces. It’s clear in how reporters are vehemently scribbling down half answers and stumbles that this won’t look good on the news.

“ _As I was saying_ , the evidence is solid! We have the numbers! We just need a live Maverick. That’s all we need to find a cure, and then we can save all of these android lives and prevent human fatalities in Maverick attacks!”

X pauses, expecting somebody to interrupt him, but it doesn’t happen. Rumbles echo from the walls. The press corp has gone silent.

Then, as if the universe plods inexorably to the principle of _be careful what you wish for,_ the wall on the side of the stage explodes.

The irony of android security is that, ultimately, it’s not for the androids. Zero and the rest of the security detail are placed near the doors, the best position to protect the “irreplaceable” human press corp, but nobody’s next to the stage to help poor old expendable X against the Maverick that crashes the press conference.

Zero tries to find a way around the human audience, but it’s too wide a crowd to leap over, the ceiling is too low to engage thrusters, and the reporters scrambling for the side doors have closed all openings. The only way across is through. 

He can feel his servos lock up the moment he wades into the crowd, android first law programming ( _1\. Thou shalt not harm humans_ ) physically halting his motors lest he accidentally swat some reporter in the face. He can see the female security android from earlier get pulled under by the flow of the mob before his joints finally give out and some human shoves him onto the ground.

The regulation security android armor isn’t nearly as sturdy as the Maverick Hunter stuff; it doesn’t stand a chance against the crowd. A stiletto makes a puncture in his chassis. Somebody drops their massive camera on the hole and buckles his entire chest in, and then a loafer, trailing broken glass from some poor soul’s spectacles, scrapes open the light plating on his arms and manages to hit a circulatory tube so that he begins to leak. 

They trample him. 

By the time the crowd clears out, it’s just some fearless camera people snapping photos in the back and a conflict on stage that Zero can’t see. He spots the security android a couple paces away, her ocular displays glassy, her mechanical skull and cranial processors completely crushed.

He checks his systems; it looks like his servos are unlocking. Gingerly, he stumbles back to his feet and tries to find X in all of the debris, but his oculars are off-kilter, knocked out of place by the hundreds of blows he’d taken on the floor. Desperate, he limps closer.

And by some miracle, X is still alive, holding something down on stage.

It’s a single Mav, a small child model with pigtails and a facial structure that imitates baby fat, and X has the thing at gunpoint and bound on the floor with steel cables. The Mav struggles, which is what the gun is supposed to deter. Of course, X, bleeding heart that he is, doesn’t shoot either way.

“Zero,” X says, struggling to hold the Maverick down with one hand. He’s dishevelled, synthetic skin loose with cuts and burns, teflon hair mussed until it looks more synthetic than it did before. “Zero! You’re okay!”

Zero almost says something to the effect of “of course I am,” but then he looks down at his beaten and crumpled body. He sighs.

“Affirmative,” he says. “You need help?”

X nods and leaves room for Zero to pull the steel cords a little tighter than X’s feeble hydraulic musculature can manage. The Mav still squirms, but at least it’s not so violent a movement as before, like it could knock his own gun out of his hands.

X stares at the savage, struggling mess of metal at their feet.

“I never thought the virus could make one of my children so...”

He gestures vaguely at the ground.

“‘Cuz you never met one,” Zero says. “If you did, I doubt you’d be picketing for Maverick rights as hard as you do.”

“This isn’t the time, Zero,” X says. “She needs help. Are you intact enough to carry her?”

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” Zero asks. In reality, it’s a bit of a close thing. A few of his joints feel close to buckling and his chassis is in no state to be supporting significant weight, but this Mav looks a bit on the lighter side. He reckons he can take her.

He hauls the bundle onto his shoulder to move out, and as he does, the Mav’s skirt shifts, and he sees an ID stamped across the thing’s synth skin. He scans it.

“Bolts,” he says. “Last time I saw that was when my unit busted that robo-brothel downtown.”

X nods solemnly. There’s despair in his eyes, as if he’s responsible for what happens to any one of his android children when they fall off the radar. 

Zero looks at him.

“Are you so sure we should be curing this one?” he asks. “I’ve seen some of the nasty programming they use to repurpose your work, and her mental maturity level’s probably set too low to cope. It’d probably be a mercy—”

“ _Don’t_ finish that thought, Zero,” X says. “Don’t do it. Please.”

Zero’s about to turn around and talk some sense into his friend, but then the bundle on his shoulder starts making a high-pitched whining sound.

Zero’s seen some things in his years of Hunting: Mavericked androids magnifying their regulation strength to throw cars, infected cooking droids wielding their knives like swords, and personal housekeeping droids creating small whirlwinds with their vacuums once taken by virus. A prostitute android using her Hot ‘n Cold function to melt through steel doesn’t really surprise him. 

Except his processors are still reeling from the mob, and his joints are too damaged to react properly, and there are plenty of holes in his armor to exploit, at least one of them directly above his energy core. If that goes, there’s no saving his processors.

 _Sparks,_ he thinks.

He doesn’t remember X with the plasmashot pistol until the Mav is down, a smoldering hole straight through her head.

(Zero has to watch as X takes the child android’s leaking skull into his lap, cradling the dome of it with trembling hands. The gun lays abandoned in a pool of oil.

As he sees his friend’s shoulders shaking, he wonders why androids can’t cry.)


	2. Help Scalp A Friend

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was the first concept I had for that high school creative writing workshop last year, but I was told it was too confusing for an audience unaware of mmx lore. So I literally reworked this entire thing into what you see in chapter one teehee.
> 
> Also! The concept behind these scenes was lifted from the outline for my unfinished WIP "X," if anybody still remembers or cares about that. So yeah. If that never finishes, here's a little piece of it.

Zero can’t understand his friend.

What’s an android doing playing human in this kind of crisis? This applies especially to an android of X’s processing capacity (he’s seen the recordings; the way X puzzles his way through those combat scenarios is about the only art Zero is capable of appreciating). Instead of contributing his talents to the Maverick Hunter Taskforce like Zero does, X wastes away his days going through the motions of a human professor, teaching brats and doing science-y things. 

It’s inane.

“Reconsider,” Zero says once again.

“No,” X replies. “The council let me find a job as a human. My students literally think I’m just a dude. Joining the force would ruin _all_ of that.”

“No, but buddy, _actually_ consider—”

“Zero, I brought you out to try human food, not for you to try to indoctrinate me.”

“Look, I _am_ trying the human food, see?” He takes a token sip of the milkshake, which might as well be water; it tastes like nothing to his nonexistent taste sensors. “And it’s not like I’m forcing you into something you don’t already believe. You and I both know Mavs are beyond help; the Hunters just decommission them before they can go nutso on the humans.”

X falls silent, and Zero, for a moment, thinks he’s finally gotten through, until he sees that X’s hand is trembling slightly around his crumpled napkin. 

“Please don’t call them Mavericks,” X says, barely above a whisper. “Virus or not, they’re still my children.”

Ah, right. Sometimes, it’s easy for Zero to forget that one little caveat, being, y’know, probably the only android on Earth _not_ based off of X’s design. Becoming a hunter would be especially distressing to a sensitive droid like X, given that specific circumstance.

“Ah, sparks. Parent to child. What’s it called again?” Zero muses idly, disregarding the fact that he can literally search it up. It’s such a vague question that he doesn’t expect X to get what he’s asking when he starts asking it, but X has always been uncannily keen.

“Filicide, Zero,” X says. “It’s called filicide, and you need to dial down your ‘Insensitive Jackass’ value before I walk out on you.”

(Zero just about points out that “jackass values” aren’t a real thing, but he backpedals the moment he notices the tears in X’s eyes.)

When Zero receives the comms for the latest attack, the first thing he thinks is, _Scraps. That’s where X works, isn’t it?_

With that in mind, he violates traffic law extra hard in order to get to Abel City University just a couple minutes faster. 

Except it doesn’t seem to matter. He gets to the scene, plasma cannon primed, and he sees footprints punched into the concrete walls nearby, a broken window pane above, and nobody dead or injured in the immediate vicinity. The Mav is already decommissioned, a drill partially extended from its shoulder.

It’s a bulky thing, one of those dime-a-dozen construction models with barely enough consciousness to lift a girder, but apparently that’s enough for the virus. No droid is an exception to the recent Maverick outbreak.

But who could’ve done the deed here? He’s certain he outstripped the other Hunter transports back on I-62 and vigilantes tend to get themselves scrapped before too long...

He spots the cables around the Mav’s body.

They’re thick, heavy duty things, wrapped around and secured in so many places that he’s surprised the thing was able to move at all. The plasma shot through the Mav’s cranial processors has an exit wound through the cables as well, so evidently it was shot after the thing was bound.

Then he sees X, trudging over the horizon, some light armor and a cannon on his person. Suddenly, Zero can envision the whole scenario playing out in front of him.

> A stage B Maverick stumbles its way onto the campus before taking the dive straight into violent, stage C behavior. Humans scream. Civilian androids flee. The chaos drifts through the second story windows of one Professor Xavier Cain’s classroom and suddenly a seemingly human man is bolting on an armor pack, clamping an external plasma cannon over his arm, and smashing through the glass to confront the issue.
> 
> X, bleeding heart android that he is, brings cables with him. He’s a quick and wily one, and the bulky construction model can’t keep up with the way he dances, dashing off of the walls and getting the thing all turned around and tied up until it’s so secured it can’t move. X waits, knowing a call has already been sent to Hunter HQ.

That’s where the story gets fuzzy. Why would X shoot the Mav once it’s immobilized? Zero knows something is missing here, and sure enough, as X gets closer, a student trails after him in shock.

Ah.

> X waits, knowing a call has already been sent to Hunter HQ, but then one of his students gets a little too close, chasing after his supposedly human professor in concern. The Mav, agitated, pulls out something unexpected: a shoulder mounted drill. The student freezes in shock.
> 
> X calculates his accuracy. The drill appendage itself is too thin to shoot off with reliability. If he takes out the shoulder, commands will simply flow through the plasma resistant backup channel to the same effect.
> 
> He aims for the head.

Zero sees the emptiness in X’s eyes as he finally collapses into him. Not knowing what else to do, he just catches the other android and slowly lowers them both to the ground.

Zero watches X disengage his cannon. The student, when he spots the tattered synth skin and the underlying metal components of what used to be his professor’s arm, runs.

Zero thinks dropping by with congratulations would be distasteful. After all, he knows X accepted the Hunter position mostly as his final option, after his students froze up at the very sight of him and all. But he can’t just leave him alone like that.

With a gentle knock, Zero pushes the door to X’s room open. 

“Hey, buddy,” he says. “How’re you doin’?”

X barely turns from his place seated on his charging capsule, and Zero can tell that the small smile he manages is a forced protocol.

“Somewhat better,” X says stiffly. “I have too much stuff.”

X gestures at the boxes full of his human possessions filling up his quarters and spilling out into the hallway. It’s obvious they won’t fit in the Hunters’ Spartan living space.

“That’s...huh,” Zero says.

X nods absently. “Yeah. It’s something.”

Zero takes a scan of X’s person, sees the patches of synth skin in the droid’s hands and still stuck to his body, and he realizes X had been in the middle of skinning himself. Hunter armor doesn’t leave space for stuff like that after all.

“Er...let me help you with that,” Zero says.

He grabs the loose material from X’s hands and takes over, digging his digits into the seam in X’s hair. The other android’s scalp splits clean in two, and Zero begins to gingerly peel the stuff off.

“I’m sorry, y’know,” he says. “About the Maver—er...the construction android.”

X hums, and Zero doesn’t have the heart to tell him that he should get used to it, given his new line of work. 

“And I’m sorry about being such a douche, hounding you to join the force and all.”

Another hum. What’s he supposed to say now? This kind of stuff isn’t his directive; he’s at a loss. But he’s half done with scalping his friend, the cold steel of an android chassis peaking out of what little synthetic skin remains, so he pauses and looks around. 

That’s a lot of boxes.

“I uh… I don’t keep a lot of things around,” Zero confesses. “If you’re having trouble finding space for all of your extra stuff…”

X looks up at him suddenly, eyes lighting up a tad from their previous dull shade.

Zero gives him a small grin. Yeah, that’s about the least he can do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Which version do you think is better? I personally like both for different reasons, but hey, creator bias.

**Author's Note:**

> Did you enjoy it? If you did, please let me know in some way, and if you didn't, kindly voice your displeasure in the comments. Have a great day!


End file.
